


tell me why we live like this

by triskelion (somerdaye)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Awesome Laura Hale, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Hale Family Feels, I'm so sorry, No Plot/Plotless, this is basically just an explosion of cora emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-06
Updated: 2013-09-06
Packaged: 2017-12-25 20:13:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/957167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somerdaye/pseuds/triskelion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You trust him," Cora says. Somehow, impossibly, her brother's expression gets more solemn.</p>
<p>He says, "I don't trust anyone", and that's not right at all. This isn't what he used to be like, back when he and Cora shared parents and a living space. Everything about him has changed.</p>
<p>Everything, in general, has changed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tell me why we live like this

When Cora was seven, she broke a picture frame. She was running in the house just like she'd been told a million times not to when her elbow caught one of her parents' wedding photos. The crash had Laura appearing at the top of the stairs before Cora even registered what she'd done.

"Mom's going to be so mad," she'd told Laura matter-of-factly, and Laura had smiled.

"Not if she doesn't know about it."

Laura sat with her on the front porch, cross-legged and prettier than Cora would probably ever be. She taught Cora the anatomy of a lie: sweating, stammering, increased heart rate, avoidance of eye contact. There were things you could do, Laura had said with a mischievous glint in her eye, to deceive even an alpha. As soon as Cora had learned the word _patience_ , she'd dismissed it as stupid, something her family definitely didn't have, but the way Laura smiled made her stick the lesson out. By sundown, she was really getting the hang of it.

Derek came into the clearing before the sky darkened completely. He was carrying his dumb basketball from his dumb away game and had probably left their parents somewhere in the woods to prove his maturity or something, so Cora didn't feel bad about saying, "There's a ginormous zit on your nose, Derek."

He'd looked so horrified, and ran inside so fast, that Laura tumbled off the porch with the force of her laughter.

"You're all right, kid," she'd said, affection oozing out of every syllable.

This is how Cora remembers her big sister. For the years she'd been led to believe both her siblings had burned with everything else she loved, this is the memory she held close to her heart.

Everything about Derek makes her feel like she's regressed to a younger version of herself, but she’s never felt as childish as she does when he tells her Laura was cut into halves by their uncle and she responds by covering her ears and fleeing the room. He follows her, which is so _Derek_ that she wants to scream.

"Hey," he says, and she can hear him clearly through the barrier of her hands. He must know that, but he still steps close enough to pull them away and awkwardly hold onto them. Like he's forgotten how to touch people without trying to hurt them. "I'm sorry. I'm only explaining why you shouldn't trust Peter. I didn't mean to upset you like that."

"You trust him," Cora says. Somehow, impossibly, her brother's expression gets more solemn.

He says, "I don't trust anyone", and that's not right at all. This isn't what he used to be like, back when he and Cora shared parents and a living space. Everything about him has changed.

Everything, in general, has changed.

Cora thinks about her sister's encouraging smile and the stuffed pig she'd kept on her bed and the way she used to put Derek in headlocks whenever they crossed paths in the house. Then she thinks about how her sister was torn apart and everything they all held dear is nothing but ash and how Derek thinks physical contact means someone is actively trying to murder him.

She doesn't cry. Crying has always felt useless to her. What drives her, keeps her moving every day since the fire, is anger.

"Who can I blame?" she asks in a whisper.

"Me," Derek says, "it's my fault."

Cora looks at him, hard, trying to find her brother under all the guilt and self-loathing. The Derek she'd known would have never taken the blame for anything. Even if it really had been his fault.

"I could never blame you," she lies. From the way his shoulders relax, she supposes she's gotten quite good at saying things that aren't true. All thanks to her patiently amused sister, back when Laura's laugh could fill a room and her torso was still connected to her hips.

\--

Cora really hated being home-schooled when she was growing up, but being in a high school now makes her devoutly thankful she never had to attend this cesspool of hormones. She interrupts Lydia's tryst because she actually needs to talk to the girl. Maybe she isn't the best at reasoning with people, but that's no excuse for a human boy to come swaggering out of nowhere like he's _rescuing_ Lydia from her.

The weirdest thing is, his scent is familiar. It's all around the loft, branded into Derek's hands, totally drenching every inch of Scott, but that isn't why she recognises it.

"What's your name?" she asks on their hunt for a certain classroom.

"Stiles," is what he replies, but it doesn't feel right. She thinks she used to play with this boy, back when Derek wasn't too cool to take Cora to the playground. Of course he smells different now, pheromones and dirty socks and hair product layered on top of the anxiety and gummy worms that's familiar, but her nose has always been her best superpower.

She isn't sure what makes her ask, "Have you eaten a whole container of gummy worms recently?"

Lydia shoots her a stupendously judgemental look, but Not-Stiles just shakes his head like he's used to werewolves asking about his eating habits.

"Scott told me I always smell that way. I gotta say, I'm pretty disappointed my inherent scent isn't something sexier." He sighs, and Cora gets the impression that this is something he's complained about before. "Also, I wish you guys would stop, like, smelling me. It's pretty creepy."

"I'm the least creepy living member of my family," Cora points out. Neither of them argue. "I was only asking because I think we used to hang out as kids, a bit. Except I don't think your name was Stiles then."

Not-Stiles finds the classroom he's looking for and holds the door open for Lydia. He stands there and looks at Cora curiously, like he's only just realised she isn't an extension of her brother. He shakes his head, no recognition visible on his face. "Sorry, I don't have scent memory or whatever, and I've kinda tried to forget a lot of my childhood."

"So have I."

All of Not-Stiles' bravado sags out of him at the reminder, but he doesn't try to apologise again. He just nods into the open classroom to invite her inside. She knows that he won't even try to remember their playground interactions, but she digs for the memory like it's buried treasure. She doesn't recall Not-Stiles specifically, but there's a feeling of safe happiness with kids that are practically strangers, all because her big brother is close enough to help her if she needs it. He'd been flopped on the grass, reading one of Laura's comic books, and giving her smiles whenever she shouted his name.

She likes the memory better this way. The more she can think about her family before the fire and not want to knock someone's teeth out, the better.

\--

It has been a long, long time since Cora has allowed herself to care about something, and there's a very good reason for that.

This is where it always leads. Except she's never had a body to cry over before. It takes the combination of Lydia's soothing voice and Isaac's strength to get her off Boyd's chest. She looks to her brother, who hasn't moved an inch since she came splashing into the room. Not-Stiles has his hand on Derek, grounding him to reality, for which Cora is thankful somewhere in her mind.

Every death she's been near enough to feel -- most of her family, the blonde beta in the vault, Boyd -- has been at least partially Derek's fault. She should hate him. She can't, though, because despite everything Derek is still her big brother.

She kneels in front of him and wraps her arms around his neck to show that she isn't frightened, that she still cares. The embrace traps Not-Stiles' hand, but he just crashes into the water with them and tentatively hugs them both. Behind Cora, Isaac whines low in his throat before plastering himself to Cora's back. The lady who'd been by the door is still there, Cora's ears tell her, so the hand smoothing down her hair must be Lydia's. Eventually they all need to stand up, because the humans are definitely going to catch colds, and Isaac needs to carry Boyd's corpse somewhere that isn't the waterlogged loft.

Cora refuses to let go of Derek until she has to, until everyone else has left and Derek is trying to extricate himself from her iron grip. When she relents, he takes off through a window, leaving her alone.

The water has soaked her calves, but she can barely feel it now. She stands there, replaying Boyd's smile on the mental loop reserved for her family, until Peter comes home from wherever he'd been lurking and wonders aloud if they have a leaky tap.

"Boyd's dead," she tells him.

"Okay," Peter says. Of course he doesn't care about the death of one more teenager, who is she kidding? "We need to get this place dry again. Do you know where Derek keeps a bucket?"

\--

"Can I use your cell phone?" Cora asks when Derek is half-asleep and agreeable. They're over three days away from Beacon Hills, and she's got about a fifty/fifty shot of getting Derek to do something she wants him to. He's been alternating between 'super helpful big bro' and 'doom gloom forever' at an alarming rate since they left.

"Go ahead," he says, tossing the phone across the gap between their uncomfortable motel beds. She scrolls through his pathetically short list of contacts and promptly dissolves into giggles.

"Okay, while the fact that I'm pretty sure ninety percent of your contacts are teenagers doesn't surprise me, I always had you pegged as a full name guy."

To her massive shock, Derek barks a laugh.

"No," he says, still sort of grinning. "I like changing the names based on my mood. It protects their identities, you know, but that's just the excuse I tell myself for doing it. The real reason is that I think it's kinda funny. If you tell me who you want to call I can find their listing for you."

Cora looks up from the screen, properly, and for the first time in six years she and her brother are actually smiling at each other over a joke.

"Thanks for the offer, but I think I'll just guess. Like cellular Russian Roulette."

Thumbing through the contact list, Cora says her favourite names out loud just to hear Derek laugh again. She isn't sure who _Long-Distance Douchebag_ is, but Derek hides his face in a pillow when she giggles it, so she's guessing he forgot about whoever it is. There's so little humour in their lives nowadays that Cora is very happy Derek ever thought to do this.

" _I Think Stiles Put This Number In When He Made Me Strip_?" Cora asks, clicking the contact to read the whole thing.

"I don't even know what to say to you," Derek says into his pillow. "It's pretty self-explanatory."

"It explains zero things," she protests. "I think that one is my favourite, though, followed closely by _Actual Creepy Uncle_ and _Probably A Better Alpha Than Me_."

Derek erupts into real, uninhibited laughter, and when he rolls off the bed she is reminded so strongly of Laura that for a moment her heart clenches. Except this is the normalcy she'd been hoping to find in the voice of someone from Beacon Hills -- the whole reason she'd taken his phone, really. She nudges Derek with her foot and joins him in laughing until they're both having trouble breathing. It's so unlike their other recent interactions that Cora can almost imagine Laura is in the bathroom, yelling at Derek for using her shampoo, and their parents are huddled together under the stars outside.

Of course it hurts like a bitch to think about, but seeing Derek on a motel floor, hugging himself while he gasps for air -- it's worth it.

She looks at the phone still cradled in her hand and decides to call _Saved My Life, Still Annoying_ on one of Derek's grumpier days. She does, however, snap a photo of Derek. His mouth is open in a laugh, and his eyes are scrunched up into happy lines so they don’t trigger. It's a really sweet picture. Feeling devious, she sends it to everyone on his contact list.

When she checks the responses in the morning, they vary from **whoa, his face isn't stuck in a perma-frown?** to **it's 5 a.m. in London, McCall, so fuck off**. She hands Derek his phone and watches his face fall in horror. It's pretty brilliant.

\--

The only call she receives on the road is from Lydia ( _Her Fault Peter's Alive_ ), who wants to know if either she or Derek have tips on lying to an alpha.

"Tired of your boyfriend catching you doing bad things?" Derek snarks from the driver's seat. Lydia rattles off such creative and terrifying insults that Cora puts her on speaker just to watch her brother get shamed into silence by a mostly-human girl.

"I think you and I could be friends," Cora says when the tirade is over.

Lydia sighs like she was expecting more from Cora, but isn't surprised to be disappointed. "Sweetheart, we're already friends. You didn't actually think I called to ask your asshole of a brother for help, did you?"

The warmth that fills Cora at those words drowns out Derek's offended noise and Lydia's response. It's -- she and Boyd weren't friends, not really, and Isaac's fixation on Scott baffles her, and Not-Stiles has never trusted her on account of her family. The way Lydia says _friend_ , like there was never any doubt, makes it temporarily hard to think.

"I haven't had a friend in six years," she says, interrupting some kind of argument over which of them has done the other more wrong.

"Well," Lydia drags the word out, and Cora can practically hear her eyes rolling, "you've got one now. And you'll have yourself a best friend if you can teach me how to lie to an alpha."

\--

When Cora was very young, she's not certain on what her age was, her family went on vacation somewhere far north. It was her first experience with snow and, honestly, she hated it. Too cold, too wet, and she didn't understand at all why Derek and Laura were rolling around in it like dogs. She was safely bundled in her father's lap while her siblings competed to see who could jump highest to catch snowflakes on their tongues.

When they came back to the hotel parking lot, Derek shook his hair out onto Cora. She'd always hated when kids her age cried at the drop of a hat, but she'd learned a few weeks before that Derek panicked in the face of tears.

So, she'd started to wail as more of a punishment to her brother than as an actual reflex. As expected, Derek's grin disappeared immediately. He gathered her in his chilly arms and lifted her from her father's lap, making strange shushing noises as he did so.

"Hey, come on, Cor," he'd desperately said. "Please don't cry, I didn't mean it."

"Mean Derek," Cora had announced, her family laughing at the exaggerated pout on her face. Derek would've usually launched a tickle attack at that point until she begged for mercy, but there was still wetness clinging to her eyelashes. Instead of tormenting her, like her brother tended to do, he kissed her nose and apologised. He told her that he loved her.

This is the Derek she remembers, and he's been making quite the reappearance lately. Like, Cora is never cold, because Derek's jacket is over her shoulders before she even has the chance to shiver.

He's looking out for her again, the way he used to when he was making sure she didn't fall off the swings or stick sharp objects into power outlets.

It's so very clear that he's out of practice. He doesn't know how to touch people unless he's breaking their bones, and he outright refuses to let her call Lydia more than once a week. The protectiveness is there, though, in every hair he brushes from her forehead and every blanket tucked around her and every boy on the street he turns his serial-killer glare on.

Derek's trying, is the important thing. So when he asks, "Are you happy?", she tells him that she's hasn't been this happy since before their lives came crashing down with their home, and there's no trace of a lie in that.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks, allie, for the beta as always! you're the actual best.


End file.
